


Routines

by winterysomnium



Series: Catlad/Red X AU [2]
Category: DCU - Comicverse, Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 03:05:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterysomnium/pseuds/winterysomnium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I never had a Mom like me before.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Routines

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: stupid, not-funny jokes ahead.

Selina says it’s simply routine, the ritual between their relation but Tim insists it’s like a machine turning on, circuits and programs whirring under plastic chests, that it’s like typing out passwords into each other’s palms, a hitch in his gut if the feeling dissipates, if the years young continuity curls around its center, if it’s impossible to complete. 

But for today, gestures click into their places, settle into the crooks of their smiles, settle into the noise of their moving bones. 

Selina kisses his forehead, with no lipstick on and her skin scented after raspberries and the perfume she taps onto her wrists and neck, the well of her palm lingering on the back of his head while he smiles like a tiny boy that finished all of his lunch and scribbled homework curled up into her lap, the house cats warming up the small of his back or his cold toes, draped over his ankles and purring when he touched their ears, biting into his fingers if he teased them. 

It’s what he remembers it being like: warm and noisy; imperfect and cramped but never lonely, never a drag of uncertainty or the taste of dejection prickling at his teeth, never a fight they couldn’t whisper through. (That’s what he remembers it being like.) 

What being like her son is.

(It’s what Jason dreads to see. It feels invasive, feels cocky to meet her; voyeuristic of him. He didn’t meet Tim’s naked silhouette, didn't see beyond his clothes yet but he’s supposed to meet their raw, bare family, to explore what’s uncut and functional between them and it’s why – why he’s confident yet wary. Himself but half of Red X too. 

He’s crossing their lines.)

Tim kisses her cheek and squeezes Jason’s palm that is a bit sweaty, a bit cold so he knows the boy _is_ nervous after all, is fidgety somewhere underneath his lungs but looks proud and confident anyway, the lazy, slow smirk glued to his mouth and when Tim says: “Hi, Momma.” Jason slides his hand out of his pocket, discreetly dries it against his jeans.

“This is Jason,” Tim introduces him, goes for the simpler syntax of greetings, for the simplicity they won’t achieve in anything else (not in their cells or thefts or fondness), not when words are just words and when actions speak over them, press them out of the world; _out of sight out of mind_ and most days, spoken letters are trapped in their invisibility, stand as the shade for your act.

(But they still give you power.)

Their youngest kitten meows and stumbles and tries to bite Jason’s toes and it’s a _good_ thing, an intermission for everyone to catch the slip ups of achy synapses, slippery pleasantries and dry affection, it’s _nice_ because Jason jokes and pretends mock terror as he cries out: “ _Oh no_ , not the gumdrop toes!” and when Tim picks her up, a short laugh decorating his mouth, her baby soft paws padding around his knuckles, Jason moves on to Selina’s presence, offers his hand. 

“Nice to meet ya, Ms. Cat,” he says, grows a smile out of the rocky field of his smirk, shaky around the corners of his consciousness; he’s about to lose the rumors wrapped around his skin.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. _Gumdrop Toes_ ,” Selina says; shakes his bare hand, as warm as his is cold.

Jason snorts and dips one of his arms until it finds its place dozing off on the small of Tim’s back, fabric under pliant fingers under the press of the hall. “I deserved that,” he admits, brittle with her smile, grounded when Tim scoots to the right so their hips can touch, feel the outside of their clothed bones.

“Okay, so now that we have established an embarrassing nickname for my boyfriend, maybe we could have lunch? I didn’t get to eat breakfast,” Tim asks, sheepish under the twin frowns that freeze on Selina’s and Jason’s lips, under the question curled in the arch of Selina’s eyebrow.

“I overslept,” he answers, predicts that Jason’s displeasure stiffens where Selina’s seems to be melting in a minute, subtle way and suddenly every bone seems to be prominent, his skin shrinking around his growing skeleton.

“You told me you would get something while I was having a shower!” Jason accuses, says without tangible anger, without breathing in hurt but – Tim gets the emotion behind it anyway.

“I had coffee?” he offers, adds: “With milk?” glancing back at his Mom, her own gaze fond in the instinctual, _I’m going to stuff you full of calories in about ten minutes_ motherly way while Jason’s posture remains unimpressed, mouth as stiff as his jaw. To Tim, eating an hour before lunch seems a waste, a bit of milk in his coffee an acceptable substitute but Jason is touchy about the subject, dislikes hunger when it’s not needed, food that doesn’t get eaten on time, eats even if it’s something he can’t swallow without wincing, without grimacing when he chews.

“C’mon, Jay.” Tim tugs at his jacket, once, twice. In Morse code it’s _I_ and in Timmers speech it’s _hurry up, handsome_ and language leads Jason to _impatience_ , to the intentional irony of Tim’s fingers, a hidden joke that loosens the knots in his stomach, the jitters resounding in his teeth. “The longer you’re going to glare at me the longer is my stomach going to be moaning about being empty, you know?” Tim adds, fills the corners of his face with a nicely cut, soft smile.

“You can talk yourself out of everything, don’t you, Timmers?” Jason sighs and rubs the top of the kitten’s head, her tiny body snuggly folded on the width of Tim’s palm, her fur tickling along Tim’s wrist.

“Got it from Momma.” Tim winks and with Jason’s fingers nestled on the dip of his spine they follow Selina’s noiseless footsteps, losing contact when the kitchen opens up and they help set the food on the table, onto their plates. A grown up siamese jumps into his lap to sleep when Jason sits down, his and Tim’s ankles bumping between the stools’ feet, Selina carefully picking up the drowsy cat away, away from Jason’s thighs and the chaos of touch is so diverse, so dizzying he forgets to joke when she asks: “Would you like juice or water, Jason?”, forgets about asking _“What, no milk?”_ and settles for a hasty, honest answer.

Hasty, honest, at home.

(That’s what Jason’s Morse code stitches into Tim’s ankle. That’s what his mouth doesn’t tell.)

\---

His jacket sucks the cold out of the balcony, out of the heavy coldness of spring and shuddering rains; the smoke screen leaking out of his mouth lazily could easily eat at his lips, nag and curl in the corners until its job would be done, until Jason wouldn’t have to face himself anymore.

Regardless, Tim reads the Braille of his skin, doesn’t require the sight of Jason’s _moutheyesface_ to know; the mute trail of fingers, of Jason’s silhouette shapes he considers a new language, something that took him long, angry months to see.

The smoke scratches down his throat, leaves the inside of his spine itchy; a bad habit chosen for bad, unsubstantial reasons and it’s his first smoke of the week, fresh and raw within his inner sides, within the reach of his intake.

Tim opens the door built between them, slips through the quiver of space and hides his ribcage from the chill, crosses his arms, crosses the rivers of silence and wind that surround their shoulders, his forearms a wooden bridge that keeps expanding from beneath, his cheek pressed to the back of Jason's shoulder, to the outside of his sight.

“What’s wrong?” Tim asks, his bones digging into Jason’s, his pressed cheek accentuating his downtown accent, the lull of his tongue, the dry drawl that shows when he’s sleepy or hurt.

(Jason stains his mouth with more smoke.) “You’re succeeding in trying to imprint three of my vertebras onto my lungs but, that’s about it,” he answers, exhales. 

“You’re _smoking_.” Tim points out, forfeits to the cold and circles his hoodie wrapped arms halfway into Jason’s sides, finds Jason’s pockets and fills them with his fingers and knuckles and tips of wrists and –

“Why _thank you_ , hot stuff. You’re not bad yourself,” he jokes but it doesn’t fit, doesn’t fill up all of his mouth, all of the syllables he wanted, all of the spaces it could.

“ _Jason_.” Tim’s voice twitches, wavers with identical wrongness, like it was only half of his mouth too, only a hint of what’s there. 

(Honesty.

Jason heard it’s vital to relationships or when you’re talking to your dentist or when your boyfriend asks what’s wrong, when lying only drives you away, drives you to Red X and drives you off the road; when lying rarely means that you’re safe or believed, rarely means that you’re secure.

Rarely means anything good at all.)

“I just want your Mom to like me,” he says; breathes against Tim and Gotham and his own skin, against the carbon monoxide seeped into his cells, his blue, young veins. “I never had a Mom like me before,” he adds.

Tim stirs, thinks with Jason’s distant heartbeat echoing underneath his ear, presses his pocket hands to Jason’s belly.

“Mine does. She even took out the chocolate chip cookies and – they’re her favourite. _Trust me_.”

And Jason does but –

“She even let you _smoke_. Anything you come up with, I can negate, handsome.”

“ _Fine_.” Jason closes the gasping mouth of the cigarette; flicks it into the glossy dip of an ashtray, turns to soak in the glimpse of Tim’s face. “You win this one, hot stuff.”

“Don’t I always?” Tim grins and –

(Honestly?)

He does.


End file.
